3 Link Building Methods that Work and Why You Should Care

By Jeff

Here are Three Methods for Building Link with Pros and Cons

Number 1: Guest Publishing. Pros: Ability to target your audience by addressing someone else’s. Very effective traffic: they are already interested in your topic. High quality backlinks. Cons: You have to do some research on whose audience you want to reach and get to know some bloggers. Low quantity of backlinks. People will let you guest-post, but not take over their blog entirely.

That’s about it. Almost no downside, high upside.
Number 2: Social Media. Pros: Very easily shared. Content can go viral, spreading across the net in ways you would never have imagined. The cost of sharing your content is one click, if you are set up right. This is where other bloggers can pick up your material and link to it without your solicitations. Cons: The huge amount of traffic that social media can suddenly send your way could crash your server if you’re working with limited bandwidth. Also, it is very likely that most of this viral traffic will not be targeted, and that most of it will bounce off your site.

Still, social media is an excellent strategy.
Number 3: Article Marketing Pros: Can generate targeted traffic. You can customize your own backlinks and anchor text, a major SEO advantage. Can be automated. Results in a high quanity of backlinks. Cons: You don’t know where your content will end up. Results in relatively low quality backlinks.

This is a highly effective method that is nevertheless looked down upon by “real” SEO experts. This is because it can be done relatively cheaply and does not require enormous consulting fees. If you are results-oriented, and you want a website that brings you results, definitely keep article marketing in mind.

So Why Do I Need To Worry About Links, Anyhow?

Nobody likes a braggart. If you stand on your soapbox and proclaim to the world about how awesome/talented/extremely loud you are, you will get a few variations of the same reaction; “So what?” It is far more lucrative to be spoken of favorably by others.

This is the rationale behind reference marketing: testimonials. With websites, references are links.

A link building strategy is crucial to search engine promotion. Part of the ranking algorithm is concerned with the relative authority of websites. How do they measure authority? Links.

Are all links created equally? No.

For one thing, the anchor text are taken into account. For example, the anchor text for this link is “this link.” This anchor text is not very good. Ideally, you want your anchor text to include one or more of your keywords, and to correlate strongly with the content on the page the link leads to. In most cases you don’t really have any control over the anchor text, unless a kind blogger contacts you and asks you what you would like your anchor text to target.

For another thing, the search engine rankings weigh the authority of the links by the authority of the pages they link from. A link from CNN.com is much more valuable than a link from lookatmycatinahat.com. Your best bet for getting links from high places is to create effective and compelling content that appeals very strongly to your target audience.

And finally, the quantity of links is very important. All other things equal, a site with more incoming links ranks higher than a site with fewer links.

If your goal is to build an effective website, then you must have a link-building strategy, end of story.

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